3 Money, money, money - The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy by Tim Harford #bruciatoridibanconote #lacavadellamoneta #tesoriaffondatichecontinuanoavalere #oroecontrollosullestampanti #comecapirequantosonoricco #iperinflazioneordinariafollia #comeuscirne
August 1994, two retired musicians, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, flew to Jura, in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.Read more at location 750
Drummond and Cauty had, it is said, emptied their bank accounts to put the money together.Read more at location 754
Drummond and Cauty stripped out a £50 note each, lit them with a cigarette lighter, and set the rest of the money ablaze.Read more at location 756
They saw their action as an artistic statement. The art world didn’t seem to agree. What most people did agree on wasRead more at location 761
Cauty and Drummond had committed a dreadful waste of resources.Read more at location 762
list of what £1 million could have bought, including ‘RWANDA – 2,702 kits which will feed a total of 810,810 people’ and ‘HOMELESS – B&B accommodation for 68 families for one yearRead more at location 764
Couldn’t the men have given the money to a good cause instead?Read more at location 770
Drummond protested: ‘If we’d gone and spent the money on swimming pools, Rolls Royces, I don’t think people would be upset. It’s because we’ve burned it that people are upset.Read more at location 770
At that point, Byrne challenged Drummond and said that there could have been more apples or bread in the world if they’d used the money wisely.Read more at location 775
You’re going to tell me Byrne was wrong and Drummond was correct. Am I right? You are indeed. The simplest way to see that is to ask how much it would have cost the Bank of England to print £1 million to replace what Drummond and Cauty incinerated.Read more at location 777
when he said that he hadn’t destroyed bread or apples, only paper, he was absolutely right.Read more at location 782
Instead of being outraged, people should have been thanking them.Read more at location 785
extra money should mean more demand for existing resources at the same priceRead more at location 788
if, as is more likely, Drummond and Cauty were burning money in an economy where supply and demand balanced out, the resulting effect is simple to describe: average prices in the economy would drop.Read more at location 794
the effect of Drummond and Cauty’s ‘art’ was probably undetectable. Still, it was there in principle:Read more at location 797
The fundamental problem is that when we think about money, we instinctively think about individual purchasing powerRead more at location 803
island of Yap, in Micronesia in the West Pacific. Their coins, the rai, are stone wheels with a hole in the middle. Some are fairly portable – a handspan or less across, and the weight of a couple of bags of sugar. But the most valued stones are far biggerRead more at location 817
The biggest stones might have been used for major transactions such as buying land or wives;Read more at location 827
Yap islanders had to develop an important monetary innovation: they divorced ownership of the stone from physical control of the object.Read more at location 829
One day, a crew from the quarries were bringing a new large stone from Palau when they ran into a storm not far from the coast of Yap. The stone sankRead more at location 833
But of course, if the stone propped up outside your hut doesn’t need to move around to change ownership, why should the stone at the bottom of the sea be any different?Read more at location 834
For many years the monetary systems of the developed world were based on gold.Read more at location 840
Naturally in an anonymous urban society such as London or Venice, nobody could use the Yap Island Honour System of ‘everyone knows that’s Tim’s gold lying there’.Read more at location 843
The gold, like the stone rai, rarely moved. It stayed in the bank vaults. People would instead carry around pieces of paperRead more at location 844
After a while, it became obvious that it was easier to pass around the credit notes than to go back and forth to the goldsmith all the time. Banknotes such as the US dollar and the pound sterling were descendants of this system.Read more at location 849
Kublai Khan, Chinese emperor in the thirteenth century, introduced a system of purely paper money that astounded the visiting Italian merchant Marco Polo.)Read more at location 852
But modern currency is no longer linked to gold at allRead more at location 854
‘Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy,’Read more at location 859
On Yap, they have this crazy system where the precious stone can be perfectly good money even when it is at the bottom of the sea. In the modern world, we have a far crazier system: the precious metal can be perfectly good money even though it isn’t there at all.Read more at location 861
So if we want to think clearly about what function money serves in an economy, we should start by realising that money doesn’t have to be pieces of paper or metal coins – it can be gigantic stones. Nor does it have to be intrinsically valuable.Read more at location 865
True, gold and rai were valued for much the same reason: they were beautiful and rare.Read more at location 867
All that is necessary for money to have value is for everyone to believe that it has value.Read more at location 872
A medium of exchange is a way of keeping track of transactions. In modern societies, paper money is a medium of exchange.Read more at location 878
That’s what happens on Yap – the population is small enough that the giant database, keeping track of who owns which stones, can be in their heads.Read more at location 883
The second function of money is to store value. A dairy farmer hoping to save for retirement cannot just put churns of milk in his basement: the milk is unlikely to retain its value long enoughRead more at location 887
There’s a connection between money’s functions as a medium of exchange and as a store of value. The medium of exchange allows us to move purchasing power through space – from one situation (doing the laundry) to another (buying a computer). The store of value moves purchasing power through time.Read more at location 890
The final function of money is in some ways the most important, and the strangest. Money is a unit of account. An alternative way to phrase that is to say that money is a kind of reference point, a standard of value.Read more at location 894
Now, at the time of writing you could call that £641,500, or €795,800. Or you could call it 10,893 barrels of oil. Or 1730 shares in Apple.Read more at location 904
The question is, what would be the most helpful way to think about your net worth? The answer is that the most valuable way of tracking your net worth is to find out what unit of account is stable relative to the kind of things you want to buy.Read more at location 907
This will often mean thinking of your salary or your net worth in terms of a currency, because good currencies typically are quite stable relative to all the things you might want to buy.Read more at location 916
For example, salt was used in early contracts – it’s the basis of the word ‘salary’ and it seems likely that Roman soldiers were originally paid in salt. This makes sense, because salt had a very stable value. The demand for salt is stable, because everybody needs a bit, but nobody wants a lot; the supply of salt, meanwhile, was also stable because it was produced by age-old techniques.Read more at location 920
Bitcoin was developed in 2008 by a mysterious person or group of people with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. He, she or they developed a way by which Bitcoins could be produced, or mined, slowly – a bit like gold. Some people love Bitcoin for the same reason that some people love gold – it’s independent from any government, and there’s a hard limit on how many Bitcoins can ever exist. But just like gold, Bitcoin is not money for a very simple reason: it’s far too volatile.Read more at location 936
This does suggest, though, that a dollar isn’t automatically money either – it’s only money if it keeps a reasonably stable value. Absolutely. When my tutor Tony Courakis was a young boy in post-war Greece, he played Monopoly with real moneyRead more at location 942
Another example is when the dollar wasn’t good enough money to use in contracts to pay the soldiers fighting for Massachusetts in the US Revolutionary War.Read more at location 946
Colchester, a journalist at the Financial Times, pointed out that the Mars Bar was a fantastically stable unit of accountRead more at location 953
Colchester showed that all sorts of prices had stayed stable over the decades, provided that the Mars Bar was used as the unit of account.Read more at location 955
this discussion of money would help us to understand why it isn’t always a good idea to try to solve your economic problems by printing more banknotes.Read more at location 962
Zimbabwe had so much inflation that they had to knock three zeros off the end of their currency, so the billions became millionsRead more at location 965
One sextillion Zimbabwean dollars is written Z$1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,Read more at location 971
We economists call this kind of thing hyperinflation, and it makes modern economic life near impossible.Read more at location 972
But in October 1923 in Germany, monthly inflation was nearly 30,000 per cent, as prices more than doubled every four days.Read more at location 981
they used cigarettes instead of currency, while they used currency instead of firewood. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, The Black Obelisk, describes life in this era. After lighting a cigar with a 10 mark bill, the narrator, Ludwig, turns to his friend Georg. ‘How are we doing really? Are we ruined or in clover?’ Georg replies: ‘I don’t believe anyone in Germany knows that about himself.’Read more at location 982
Yugoslavia in 1994, where monthly inflation topped 300 million per cent; by Zimbabwe in 2008; and in particular by Hungary in 1946. Hungary holds the unenviable world record for the highest ever monthly rate of inflation at 41,900,000,000,000,000 per cent – a rate at which prices more than treble every day,Read more at location 986
Ludwig and Georg discovered, money becomes useless as a unit of account: it becomes impossible to work out what anyone or anything is worth, without referring to some alternative currency.Read more at location 994
The story starts in the 1990s. Brazil had been suffering from bouts of inflation for decades, and prices in the country were increasing by 80 per cent a monthRead more at location 1008
President Sarney, in the mid-1980s, made it illegal to raise prices. This is a common response to inflation,Read more at location 1020
sellers took their products off the shelves until prices increased again. (Beef farmers even hid their cows.Read more at location 1021
Another attempt at a solution was to replace the currency with a new, improved, non-inflationary currency.Read more at location 1023
The new plan relied on separating out the three functions of money.Read more at location 1033
The medium of exchange would remain the cruzeiro. The store of value, such as it was, would remain the cruzeiro. But the unit of account would change. How could that work? It was absurdly simple. Every price in every shop would no longer be listed in cruzeiros but in URV, or unidade real de valor (‘units of real value’).Read more at location 1036
The URV kept its value. (For a while, it was pegged to the US dollar.)Read more at location 1045
But why would you think about the loaf in terms of cruzeiros? It is much more natural to think of the loaf in terms of its price in URVs.Read more at location 1049
This is the remarkable achievement of the ghost currency: without ever taking any kind of physical form, it became the way in which Brazilians instinctively thought about what things were worth.Read more at location 1050
Note: CAMBIARE LA MENTE. PEGGARE IL DOLLARO ALMENO NELLE VETRINE. INDICIZZAZIONE AUTOMATICA DI TUTTO Edit
It seems like a bizarre psychological conjuring trick, but perhaps the trick was not so hard to pull off.Read more at location 1052
This wasn’t the only change in policy, of course. The Brazilian government was turning off the printing presses, balancing its budget, clamping down on wage inflation, and so on.Read more at location 1055
But the key was the psychological fixed point of the URV, which helped everybody figure out what everything was really worth.Read more at location 1056
One day, 1 July 1994, the Brazilian government simply abolished the cruzeiro and replaced it with the long-stable URV, now called the real.
